When I first started working in politics as a junior aide on Walter Mondale's 1984 presidential campaign it never occurred to me that I would one day work in the White House. There were plenty of women among the volunteers who stuffed envelopes and walked precincts. But there were fewer and fewer on each successive level of influence and access.

I've always written all my life and when I was very young I developed an interest in poetry.

A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things which ponders listens penetrates where the earlier less developed consciousness passed lightly by is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.

In my late teenage years I developed a real passion for it and wrote a lot of poetry.

You know in my music career there was a moment where the irony was just so heavy. There were people in my audience that were the reason I developed neuroses. These people that tortured my life were using my art my poetry as fuel for them to torture other people.

In the Peace Corps the volunteer must be a fully developed mature person. He must not join to run abroad or escape problems.

Character... is a habit the daily choice of right over wrong it is a moral quality which grows to maturity in peace and is not suddenly developed on the outbreak of war.

And why is our music called world music? I think people are being polite. What they want to say is that it's third world music. Like they use to call us under developed countries now it has changed to developing countries it's much more polite.

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.

We are also fortunate in being in quite a sheltered environment in terms of people moving on to do other things because there are relatively few companies in Scotland that are looking for the skill set that we've developed.